Your piece reminded me of the hours I spent cleaning and organizing everything, including our storeroom, in preparation for our first homestudy. I wanted everything to be perfect (but sadly, our social worker wasn’t looking for perfection.) I forced her to look at the perfectly organized storeroom even though she didn’t care to—I wanted credit!! I was so happy when she wrote in the homestudy “Housekeeping standards are excellent.” After the arrival of three children, our housekeeping standards are nonexistent, which is how it should be, I guess. Thanks for an enjoyable read.

We have our first home study in two days. I am not overly concerned. I LOVE our SW. We connected immediately when meeting her at her house in January. That said, we still stayed up to the wee hours of the morning cleaning and organizing to make sure everything was perfect

The original article was incredibly touching, and it’s something that we see quite frequently with parents we work with. I work at Binti Adoption Services, which helps parents speed up their home study process (we’re like TurboTax for adoption paperwork). In the hundred of parents we’ve spoken to, we’ve seen that the home study causes a lot of anxiety, since you’re letting a stranger into your home and aren’t sure of what to expect. Common questions include “Do I have enough space?” and “What are they looking for?”

However, there is no need for your home to look like it came straight out of a Pottery Barn or home improvement catalog. The social worker’s job is just to make sure that there are no safety hazards and that there is enough room to safely accommodate a child. Here’s a checklist of what social workers typically look for during the home study process: https://binti.com/home-studies/checklist/

I also loved this quote from Stacy: “Our family may not be altogether as good as we look on eight pounds of notarized paper, but we have one essential quality for adopting a child on our side: Love.”